Lotta Svärd women volunteers had to overcome fear during wartime perils

Liisa Uotila served women's auxiliary organisation for eight years

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By Minna Pölkki
     
      Liisa Uotila, 88, relishes showing off mementos dating back more than 60 years. The frail old woman, who likes to laugh, is dressed in dark blue and white, but back then her colours were white and grey.
      As a young woman, Liisa Uotila joined the Lotta Svärd organisation in 1936. Her family had moved from the southwest of Finland to Vyborg (or Viipuri, as it is known in Finnish), where her father worked for the Court of Appeals.
      Before the war Uotila focused on organising fund-raising bazaars and celebrations, and selling Lotta Day flowers in her Lotta uniform.
     
The start of the war meant plenty of work for the Lotta women. Many new volunteers joined, and were trained for various tasks.
      In 1938 Uotila, who was interested in nursing, took a six-month medical training course.
      "It was a good course", Uotila said, showing her old textbook, which has taken on a yellow hue.
      In addition to hospital duties, Lotta women were trained for tasks ranging from spotting enemy aircraft, to delivering mail to soldiers in the field, and they also served as telephone operators.
      In battle zones, Lotta women provided food for the soldiers. On the home front they baked bread and manufactured goods for the front lines.
     
In centres for the evacuation of the war dead, Lotta women would place the deceased in coffins and dispatch them home for burial.
      At Vyborg station, Liisa Uotila assisted families evacuated from Karelia to move onwards into other parts of Finland. In November 1939 she was sent to Muolanen to help set up a field hospital.
      "On the first day of the Winter War, the guards came to tell us that the city of Vyborg was on fire. It occured to me to wonder whether or not my parents had managed to get out."
      In fact, her family did make it out in time. Soon their daughter also had to leave when the field hospital had to be moved.
      The hospital was moved around to many places, depending on where the front lines were at any particular time. Uotila would prepare beds in different places, ranging from schools to farm houses.
     
Wounded and sick soldiers would flood into the hospitals for treatment. Uotila tried to sit with the patients and listen whenever she could. The men wanted to talk about their lives at home. Only rarely did they discuss events on the front.
      "I remember one captain, who was a schoolteacher. He had a family, and he had a gunshot wound in the stomach. We gave him pain killers", Uotila recalls.
      "I sat next to his bed and he talked. At night the head nurse told me that I didn’t have to sit there any more. In the morning I heard that the man had died. It sure felt bad."
     
When the Continuation War began Uotila was ordered to Juntusranta in Suomussalmi and from there, against her wishes, she was sent to Rissala Airport in Kuopio, where German forces were stationed.
      "I wanted to be at a field hospital caring for Finns."
      She was soon transferred to Käppäselkä in Eastern Karelia, where the field hospital operated in a village that had been emptied. The front line was close. The Soviet planes fired at the village, which had been razed of all its trees.
      "We could hear the rattle on the walls, but there was never any damage", Uotila recalls.
      Although it was frightening, Liisa Uotila repeated to herself that she had made a commitment, taken her oath and attended the course.
      Uotila came out of the war unscathed. Her experience in the field hospital convinced her what career to pursue: the young medical Lotta volunteer became a nurse as a civilian.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 23.11.2004

More on this subject:
 Lotta Svärd women's auxiliary organisation disbanded 60 years ago under terms of peace treaty

Previously in HS International Edition:
  War-time women auxiliaries celebrated in Finlandia Hall (27.3.2001)

MINNA PÖLKKI / Helsingin Sanomat
minna.polkki@hs.fi